18.11.08

Pirates ahoy!

I can just imagine Captain Birdseye on Newsnight, inviting because some plonker at the beeb thought he'd have some expertise to share on the matter.

'Oooo Aaaarrgh, they'll be mighty fine picin's on the coast tonight.'

Or even Jack Sparrow ringing in from the deck of a supertanker on a satellite phone, wearing a lungi of some kind, tripping us all out.

I'm dreading that current 'piracy' off the shores of east Africa is already being used to entrench nasty interests. There are hundreds of incidents of piracy annually, many more unrecorded. Why is is a big deal? hmmmm the cargo was a fraction of a day's worth of Saudi oil.

And so news capital follows economic capital. The spice must flow.

One Somali narrative is that some of the coastals were mighty peeved with foreigners using their localities to dump and fish 'liberally', and that the 'participatory autonomous and social naval defence initiative' grew from that, but then some became greedy.

Duas for Somalia and the people there, they haven't had a government since 91 and the last home-valued and nurtured initiative for political organisation was hamstrung by Ethiopia invading. Yes, Ethiopia. No doubt as regional tools of a larger malevolent interest.

Reflecting on the operation itself, I cannot help but be amazed at the shahosh, the daringness and the script-flipping quality of it. They aren't interested in the oil on board the supertanker, they just want ransom for the 25 human beings that constituted the crew.

Anyway, I'm sure some oil speculators made a packet today, off the differentials of danger.